Labor—as in childbirth– is a great metaphor.  It applies so ubiquitously. This week, I’m applying it to finals: the week when kids are completely exhausted from effort, they don’t care anymore, they just want to be done but they can’t stop. And there’s someone standing over them saying “Just push a little bit longer….”

There are some children who are born for finals week. Hermione Granger comes to mind. Kids for whom academia is a really challenging form of play. But for kids who aren’t like that—mine for example– finals week is about studying when the last drop of brain juice oozed a month ago. The parietal and temporal lobes of your brain are dry as the Mojave.  Barton Springs is calling. You’re parents have just booked  your beach  trip…so, really? You want me to try to remember the Pythagorean Theorem now?

It’s going slack: a teen version of that trick two-year-olds pull of suddenly going limp. One minute you’re holding hands with a walking child; the next you have a 40-pound deadweight hanging from your arm looking at you like “I’m not going anywhere and you can’t make me.”

Trying to get a teen to really study in that frame of mind is a task worthy of Sisyphus

Finding a motivator for that kid is tricky. It’s tempting to seek out the kid’s anxiety button and push it: “You will FAIL. You will NEVER get into a good college. You will LOSE all hope of a scholarship. You will wind up with a HORRIBLE job.  You will end up driving a used MINI VAN that smells like French fries and feet and never be able to afford even one t-shirt from Urban Outfitters.”

These sorts of threats are tempting because they have an immediate effect. Your child jumps off the sofa and begins looking for the review his teacher gave him. On the other hand, you have now breached your kid’s defensive wall and released the tsunami  of the insecurity the child was already struggling with. He was acting all “chill” about finals. But he’s not.

Now your child is a mess. He concludes he has no choice but to stay up all night drinking Red Bull and memorizing every known river on every known continent and the atomic number and mass of every element, isotope and compound.

This is no good either.

After all, some failure is part of life. You don’t want to train them to see failure as the apocalypse. Your child might fail sometimes or have a horrible job for awhile or drive a used minivan that smells like while or drive a used minivan that smells like french fries (been there, done that). And if he does, you want him to bear his hardships cheerfully, not collapse, remembering your threats echoing down through the years.

No, there has to be a positive motivator. Some people offer money. That might work except I’m not sure I have enough money to buy A’s from all of my kids. Some might offer something more concrete: a trip or a gift certificate.

It would be great if they could pursue the learning for its own sake. I believe in seeking the joy of accomplishment just because it makes you happy. And I think my kids believe in it, too. Just not during finals week. “Blah blah, Mom. Tell us again in the fall.”

So I have cultivated my own approach to academic inspiration that I call the Super Cool Action Hero approach. Every time we watch a movie where Angelina Jolie or Will Smith or Matt Damon blows out of a prison using common cleaning chemicals or employs some historic war tactic to overcome the bad guys, I try to point out that the Super Cool Action person would never have been able to do that if she or he hadn’t studied chemistry or history.

He wouldn’t have known that the leaves of that plant were poisonous or how to subdue that animal without biology. He couldn’t have solved the riddle of the evil man in the smoking jacket, escaping certain death, if he hadn’t read Shakespeare. He couldn’t have slipped through Bolivia unnoticed if he didn’t speak Spanish. Cool Super Action Heroes are almost universally well-educated. Lara Croft, Indiana Jones, Jason Bourne.

James Bond doesn’t count. He was all about the gadgets.

I hope this form of brainwashing, dripping on them while we watch action movies during study breaks, will inspire them, even as it annoys them. I am hoping that pointing out the brilliance of these characters will infuse my children’s study hours with a kind of epic coolness.

It that doesn’t work, I’ll try chocolate.